


Fall From Grace

by objectlesson



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Curtain Fic, M/M, Mild Gore, Murder Husbands, Season 3 Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 18:09:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4715639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal and Will survive the fall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fall From Grace

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably the same story every Hannibal writer is writing right now! The finale really opened itself up to a deluge of fiction about them being wretched and in love and alive together, and I'm not one to shy away from already explored ideas, so here are some murder husbands being murdery and husbandy together.

Will is dizzy. The world spins as he stumbles to his feet, head echoing with the sounds of crunching metal, gun shots, screams. He is suddenly standing, and the only solid thing amid this grey blur of street and sky is Hannibal Lecter, windswept and smiling at him from the window of a battered Baltimore Police Department car. 

Will stares, heart in his throat like Hannibal has threaded a hook through the aorta and pulled tight enough to choke him, draw him nearer. He marvels as he looks at himself in a mirror, cut to ribbons and suffocating on the deck, a hook in his heart and Hannibal Lecter’s finger in his gill. Will has caught many fish who struggle, fighting against the lure and entangling themselves further in the line as he reels them in, damaging their flesh but never succeeding in actually fighting free. It’s the ones that don’t struggle which he will sometimes throw back, if he’s caught enough that day or only fishing for the comfort of standing knee deep in a river and thinking. It’s strange that he never learned from those fish.

He swallows around the thickness in his windpipe, wondering with a vague and distant breed of of placidity how he ever deluded himself into believing he was meant to end up anywhere other than here. He blinks. Nothing changes. This is reality. 

Hannibal looks like the sun. Radiant and painful and too bright to gaze upon, so Will casts his eyes to the ground as he climbs in to the car beside him, skin burning as Hannibal watches him the way parched men watch a mirage flickering in the distance, pulling themselves along towards something which might not be there at all. He imagines Hannibal pressing his lips to an open wound and drinking. He knows he is real; he knows he will wait in the desert until Hannibal finds him, until they are both sun-baked and battered. 

They drive. Time has not reversed, but it feels like it’s standing still, preserved in ice. A crazy, reckless smile keeps trying to fit itself onto Will’s mouth, and he keeps fruitlessly attempting to chase it away. They follow the mirage, which seems an almost solid thing in the distance. 

“Are you real?” Hannibal finally asks after several minutes of tense, hungry silence. 

It’s not what Will is expecting. He turns to look at Hannibal, choosing to blind himself with the sunlight, eyes watering, stinging, streaming. “Are you?” he asks, in a voice that is all waver. 

Hannibal swerves slightly, and it seems like an unspeakably vulnerable thing to witness him doing, crass and undignified. Will feels like he has just seen Hannibal naked, flayed deep enough to glimpse the clean white flash of bone, and color climbs up his cheeks at the revelation. He feels the hook snag in his heart, line pulled so taut his insides could be tearing. 

“Reality does not matter so much as loyalty, Will. Even if you are here in this moment, and you are real, there remains the question of whether or not you will stay to see this through until its end,” Hannibal explains. Then, after gazing back at the road in its endless stretch of grey, he adds, “you have lied before.”

“So have you,” Will answers, letting his head loll back onto the seat, neck suddenly too weak to support its weight, to remain rigid and facing away from the sun, as he wants to, as he cannot keep from doing any longer. 

“Not about this,” Hannibal says. “Never.” 

Will sighs deeply, eyes climbing up the column of Hannibal’s throat, skin he has kissed before, skin he has bruised with his palms, squeezed tight with the intention of ruining, collapsing. It seems so strange, so surreal to know he could do those things again. Reach out, touch, terrorize, take. He closes his eyes, overwhelmed. “I wouldn’t be here with you if I didn’t intent to see this through until its end. I wouldn’t---I couldn’t turn away again. Not now.” _I have nothing else_ , he thinks. 

He feels Hannibal’s eyes on him, feels him slow the car down and and pull over onto the shoulder. “Are you merely letting me hold your eyes open? Or are you watching of your own volition?” He asks. 

_Aren’t they the same thing?_ Will thinks, silenced. Hannibal parks the car, studying Will so closely it aches, makes his skin crawl and stomach plummet, makes his hands shake so he makes them into fists on his lap, to keep from reaching for that throat and choking it, snapping it, finding the pulse in it with the tips of his fingers before bending to press his lips there. 

“What are you doing? Won’t someone catch up to us?” He grinds out. 

Hannibal leans into his space, cards a hand roughly through his hair and the touch is so electric, so painful that Will’s heart, barbed hook and all, clenches like a fist. He pushes his cheek into Hannibal’s palm, breath coming out fierce, rapid, beyond his control. “It wouldn’t matter, if I had not yet seen you like this,” Hannibal murmurs. 

“Like what?” Will breathes, words fractured and nearly inaudible, crushed to nothingness against Hannibal’s temple. He inhales from him; he reaches for his shirt-front and fists into it, anchoring himself as the world falls to ash and storm around their bodies. _This is it_ he thinks, disjointed and rapturous with the awe born from finally allowing himself to love Hannibal without guilt, without shame, without self-recrimination. _This is who I am._

“Transformed. Realized,” Hannibal whispers, lips in Will’s hair. “Or, at least awaiting transformation.” Then he thumbs Will’s jaw open and kisses him. 

He kisses him like he is starving and Will is a fountain of blood; he kisses him like he has been waiting three years, a lifetime. Stunned by the clarity of it, Will breaks open, and lets the tide rush in through his cracks and fissures. _This is it_ , he thinks. _This is who I am_. 

\---

They are knee deep in the sea, tide pulling desperately at their clothes as they stagger to the safety and solidity of sand. Then, in the darkness and upon the shore, they stand, brows pressed together and breath a wreck upon the other’s lips. Again, Will is dizzy, bracing himself against Hannibal with one hand and trying to steady himself with the other, clothes heavy with ocean, body wracked with a pain so pure and salt-caked it feels like absolution. 

Will is not sure if he’s dead, dying, or being reborn. They all feel the same, here, with Hannibal’s body inches from his own, skin ocean-cold and clammy under his fingertips as he digs his nails into his shoulder. He is not sure if he’s dead. He’s also not sure if he meant to die when he pulled Hannibal over, but now that he’s breathing, lungs struggling to expand and purge inhaled seawater, he’s indescribably glad. Even as he chokes and sputters and cannot stand without Hannibal supporting him, even with half his face stinging so white-hot that every exhalation is agony, he smiles. 

Hannibal slides his palm down Will’s arm, stopping to grip his hand, which is trembling and aching with chill, with the force of gathering it into a fist around the hilt of a knife and plunging it past bone, muscle, viscera. He cups Will’s face tenderly with one hand, and eases the wedding ring from his finger with the other. It leaves easily, lubricated by salt-water. Will watches it go through half-lidded eyes, watches it slide over bruised knuckles and into Hannibal’s fist, the last vestige of his former life, his former self. 

Hannibal throws it into the roiling foam of the Atlantic, and brings Will’s hand to his lips, kissing the space it once occupied. 

\---

They end up temporarily hidden in one of Hannibal’s seemingly innumerable get aways, a remote, scrubby plot of land with a singularly elegant albeit small and sparsely equipped home planted upon it. Will can tell it’s somewhere in New England, though Hannibal won’t tell him exactly where. “You still sleep walk”, he reminds him, standing at the granite countertop and hand grinding coffee beans, bandages so very white even against the pale of his skin. “You may sleep talk, too.” 

“I don’t,” Will assures him, voice still hoarse from nearly dying in the ocean. “I don’t think I do, anyway.” 

“The walking in and of itself is dangerous,” Hannibal explains, gently shaking the dark, fragrant grounds into the glass cylinder of his French press. “You might walk straight to Jack Crawford.”

_It won’t matter once we kill him_ , Will thinks, stunned by the stark simplicity of it, how easy it is to imagine himself killing Jack Crawford just as he killed Francis Dolarhyde, how little conflict he feels when once he was nothing _but_ conflict. It’s as if submitting to his truer, darker self has smoothed over the storm inside, quieted his profound fear of realizing that beneath all his neuroses and abnormalities, there was nothing separating him from the killers he studied. It feels better to accept that he is a killer than to languish in the guilt of _maybe_ being one. He feels like Hannibal has reached inside him, smoothed the tangles of his insides with one broad, certain hand. He feels owned. He feels complete. 

Hannibal pours him a cup coffee and he watches him through the hazy tendrils of steam, studies his healing wounds, his scabs and his bruises, the map to the glory they have rendered together. 

\---

They’re lying in bed, and it is sometime well after one pm. Normally this would make Will feel nauseated, disgusted with himself and his lack of productivity, but now he only feels absolved. He spent so long denying himself and Hannibal the comfort of being truly seen without masks, without translation, that he feels like they’re catching up on lost time. Will lets Hannibal keep him in bed for hours, he lets Hannibal indulge himself in his flesh, he lets him drown. After all there is no real rush to spill blood again; they are both still healing, and there are so many other things Hannibal wants from him. 

They’re twined in the sheets and in one another, Hannibal thoughtfully tracing over the bones in Will’s face, thumbing over his lips, his jaw. “What are you thinking of?” He asks, studying Will’s mouth, forever swollen from kisses, from teeth. 

Will shakes his head, fighting the urge to hide his eyes and instead regarding Hannibal unguardedly as he answers, “how _good_ this feels.” His mouth trembles, fighting a smile. This is how it is now. 

Hannibal smiles for him, eyes so dark, so wet, ready to spill over with the the fluid black of pupil. Will is stunned by how easy it is to _move_ Hannibal, how much power he holds over him. Hannibal palms over his sternum, touch rough and heavy. “Tell me how it feels, Will,” he asks, voice so thick and low and it sends barbs of overwhelm into Will’s gut.

He swallows, throat clicking. “Um,” he starts, eyes fluttering closed. “It feels like...I don’t know. How I’d imagine a snake feels when it finally sheds its skin.”

“Smooth and new, amid the ruin of old scales it no longer needs?” Hannibal breathes, rubbing up Will’s stomach, lingering over the eternal smile of his own creation. 

“Yes,” will murmurs. “Powerful, changed. Ready to fight.” 

Hannibal’s breath catches, his cock stirs and twitches against Will’s thigh as he fits himself more closely to his body. “What else?” he whispers, breath hot and damp against Will’s ear. 

“It feels like finally, finally coming back after a long trip. Crawling into my own bed, in my own house, between my own sheets. Coming home,” Will admits, pushing his knee between Hannibal’s legs to feel him, feel the sheer, sick strength of his body when possessed by hunger, the vastness and terror of his want. An involuntary sound escapes Will, and Hannibal catches it between his lips, keeps it for himself. 

They break apart in a fury of breath, Hannibal’s hands raking through Will’s hair, worrying it into tangles he will comb to smoothness later. “I want to eat the skin you shed so you can never crawl back inside,” he hisses, “and I am honored to be the home your soul chose to find its counterpart.” 

Will shudders, shutting his eyes tight against the rain of stars, arching up into Hannibal’s unrelenting solidity before opening them again. It is hard to look away from Hannibal for very long, even when it hurts, especially when it hurts. “And you,” he says, eyes fixed on the wild, tar-sticky blackness of Hannibal’s adoration. “What does it feel like for you?” 

Hannibal laughs, broken open, full of air. He extends Will’s throat by making a fist in his hair and pulling back, exposing the pale flicker of his throat with its fierce, frantic pulse. He kisses the hollow tenderly. “It’s unspeakable,” he murmurs. “Words will never do you justice, I’m afraid.”

Will wonders which of the fifty states they’re in, how close the ocean is, what highways cut through the land on either side of them, so many miles away he cannot even hear the rumble of traffic on the quietest of evenings. “Try?” he asks Hannibal. “You owe me as much.” 

Hannibal smiles into his skin before he pushes away from him, straddles his hips and catches his wrists easily when Will reaches for his shoulders, trying to pull him back into the cage of his arms. There, above him and backlit by the bay-window and its spill of noonday sunlight, he looks like a saint in a cathedral stained glass window. He looks like God. Will grows quiet and still, beholding. 

Hannibal’s, thumb comes to rest against the still-tender scar on upon Will’s cheek, puckered pink skin bearing the lattice marks of recently dissolved stitches. “It feels like heaven,” he says. “And I wake every morning compelled to pray.” 

“I thought you didn’t pray,” Will whispers. 

“I do now,” Hannibal admits. 

Will lets himself be torn into, picked apart. He lets his bones be sucked clean, and wonders who, or what, Hannibal is praying to. 

\---

On a deserted service road somewhere in Delaware, Will watches Hannibal use a surgical scalpel to carefully remove the liver, kidneys, and lungs from a still breathing corpse splayed and bleeding in the flat-bed of his truck. Trent Nicholson, nineteen year old serial rapist, star of the Dagsboro football team. Worthy of pain, worthy of humiliation. Will feels nothing but satisfaction as the lights fade from Trent’s eyes, leaving him hollow, empty. Hannibal thumbs through a tool kit for his bone-saw. “Normally I would not take meat from the greater muscle groups on an athlete. Too tough, too damaged. But because he is so young, I may be able to salvage a cut,” he explains. 

“I see,” Will says, smile so wide and animal it feels like more of a snarl than a smile, even though he is beside himself. He’s bent in two, breath staggering because he’s still not used to the exertion of killing, the wild, feral thrill of it, of _living_ , of being in love. It all feels like the same thing, and it is all sublime. He pushes the cooler of ice towards Hannibal, panting. 

Once he has everything he wants from the body, Hannibal carefully wraps the organs and meat in butcher paper and tucks them neatly beside one another in the cooler. Will admires the careful, quiet precision of it, reminded as he often is that there is no limit to what he feels for Hannibal Lecter, no sanity left in it, no self-preservation of lingering remnant of morality. There is nothing but love, love so savage and brutal he cannot tame it, he cannot put a bit in its mouth. He can only feed it flesh. 

“You didn’t take a souvenir from the Dragon,” he observes, thinking back on the first big game they took down together, all the rapture and all the glory. Such strength, radiance, madness, all lost. Gone to waste, spoiled meat. He wonders if it is something Hannibal regrets. 

“Didn’t I?” Hannibal asks. “I took you.” 

Will studies his face. The cut of his cheekbones, the black glitter of his eyes in the night like scarab shells. “Is that the same?” Will asks, fingers rising to trace absentmindedly over the scar on his cheek. “As eating someone?” He thinks of the Dragon falling to his knees between them, flesh torn to ribbons, throat bleeding in great, black gouts of blood. He licks his lips, casts his gaze down to his own hands, coated in blood-slick latex. 

Hannibal walks towards him, takes those hands in his own and holds them palm up. There is no tremor, no uncertainty. Only blood. He sucks Will’s index finger and middle fingers into his mouth, eyes fluttering closed briefly before he releases him, and smiles. “I licked his blood from your teeth,” he says. “That is enough.”

Will’s heart thunders, stomach dropping as he pitches towards Hannibal, kissing him, tonguing roughly into his mouth so he can taste it, too, so he can feel everything Hannibal is feeling. _This is it_ he thinks, drunk on the rich, coppery smell of death, of love. It’s all the same thing, transformed, realized. _This is who I am_.


End file.
